AMY YOSHITSU
Artist Statement
I am a sculptor, designer, and socially engaged artist deconstructing the interconnections between power, economics, labor, and race. I seek to illuminate these systems’ foundational interplay with psychological schemas, emotions and interpersonal relationships.
I want to contribute to building collective self-compassion and awareness by reframing experiences and conditions within historical, political, financial, and colonial contexts. I interrogate my perspective, circumstances and heritage—defined by multi-generational struggle and isolation incurred from ambitions to survive and strive within gas-lighting white supremacist patriarchal capitalism—in relation to systemic patterns, myths and power. As an Asian-American contending with inherited, conflicting duties and narratives of care-giving and achievement, I am especially interested in the conscious and unconscious positions and conditions of those whose lineages are entangled with diaspora, assimilation and imperialism.
The concepts, imagery, and materials of my work are informed by infrastructure, which encompasses the act of supporting, the undergirding for creation, and the workforce maintaining our unsustainable global practices. The objects I make embody the reality that systemic forces are driven by economic and social incentives in power structures that perniciously guide our decisions and interpretations. The intersecting histories and consequences of omnipresent apparatuses—from taxation to electrical grids to the maintenance of “racecraft” (Fields and Fields)—are foundational to the tapestry of human existence. I employ sewing and textiles to interweave the effects of entrenched systems on the body, the delicate, the intimate.